“First do no harm,” a concept central to medical ethics, is important in an age when indicators of agricultural pesticide (including herbicide) pollution represent a serious threat to environmental sustainability.
It’s an unnecessary threat given the productivity, profitability, and environmental and health benefits of organic agriculture.
The return on pesticide-intensive agricultural practices has proved unrealized, considering billions of dollars in secondary or externalized costs — from $2.2 billion in annual pesticide poisonings, water treatment and pollination, according to two Iowa State University economists, to $10 billion, according to the research of Cornell University professor David Pimentel.
A new study extols the benefits of conventional no-till farming and the herbicide atrazine, but ignores secondary pollution, health, and production costs.
Atrazine has been shown to affect reproduction of fish at concentrations below EPA water-quality guidelines, according to a U.S. Geological Survey study.
Used with genetically engineered crops bred to be tolerant of specific herbicides, another widely used no-till herbicide — glyphosate (Roundup) — is linked to acute human health effects and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Atrazine and glyphosate-tolerant crops contribute to a cycle of increasing dependency on toxic chemicals in agriculture.
USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service 2010 Agricultural Chemical Use Report finds 57 million pounds of glyphosate applied in 2009 on corn fields in surveyed states, an increase from 4.4 million pounds in 2000. Because of this, atrazine use declined.
What the chemical no-till study researchers should, but do not, ask is the question of pesticide essentiality. Organic agriculture is now a $26.7 billion industry in the U.S. and $54.9 billion worldwide. We do not need these toxic chemicals to meet our food productivity, profitability, environmental and public health goals.
A Rodale Institute study comparing organic and conventional cropping systems over a 22-year period shows equal yields for corn and soybeans, with the organic yields increasing after several years. Additionally, the study finds that 30 percent less energy is required.
Internationally, the United Nations Environment Program reports that 114 farming projects in 24 African countries using organic or near-organic practices increased yield by more than 100 percent.
Conventional no-till farming is advanced as part of a chemical approach that incorporates synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, creating a cycle of dependency as soil is depleted of its microbial life and natural mechanism for producing soil nutrients and building the soil food web, which contribute to plant health.
Organic no-till farming, though, has the benefits of conventional no-till farming and more. It minimally disturbs the soil and provides erosion control with the planting of live cover crops between rows. That eliminates toxic chemical inputs, reduces fossil fuels and synthetic petroleum-based fertilizers, builds the organic matter in the soil, increases water retention and eliminates contamination of waterways. It also protects human health and the environment, sequesters higher rates of atmospheric carbon and reduces the pressure on global climate change.
Beyond Pesticides’ pesticide-induced diseases database links pesticide exposure to asthma, autism, learning disabilities, birth defects, reproductive dysfunction, diabetes, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, and other illnesses.
The studies signal an urgency to transition chemical-intensive agriculture to organic practices.
Jay Feldman, executive director of Beyond Pesticides, a Washington, D.C.,-based coalition, serves on the National Organics Standards Board.
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